🌳 What Can the Internet Learn From Trees?
Metadata
Highlights
- In a healthy forest, the roots of these trees would be mingling with helpful fungi to transmit water and nutrients to one another, in a mutualistic network scientists call the “wood wide web.” At 70 MPH, I wonder if these Los Angeles eucalyptuses are still able to connect to one another under the roar of the freeway. Surrounded by asphalt, do they bind together, pooling meager resources, surviving one day at a time? I wonder how it feels at the edge, where the forest ends, and their messages have nowhere left to go.
- Ecosystems are like human societies: they’re built on relationships. “Our success in coevolution—our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species,” Simard wrote. “Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow, and thrive.”The life of a forest is many lives, entwined. It’s also intergenerational. The eldest trees—having survived storms, droughts, ravenous insects, and the damage wrought by capitalism and colonialism—serve as the central hubs of the wood wide web. They are the strongest, the most resource-rich, with taproots stretching far beneath the earth. Suzanne Simard calls these elders “Mother Trees,” as do many indigenous people.
- The web isn’t what it used to be. When the editors of Nature compared mycorrhizal fungi to a computer network, the web was still predominantly peer-to-peer, its users sharing their thoughts on personal home pages and homespun message-boards. Online advertising was in its infancy. But as the web has centralized, it has strayed further and further from the ideal presented by the wood wide web.
- In the forest, lowered biodiversity doesn’t give high-value crops an advantage: it ultimately reduces productivity, invites rot, pests, and disease, and amplifies the risk and spread of wildfire.
- If we take the metaphor of the wood wide web seriously, it’s hard not to see an analogy here to the context collapse endemic to social media. A few corporations control the lion’s share of public cloud infrastructure, and monopolistic ISPs exploit everyday users. Tech and social media giants have clear-cut the web, privileging high-value crops—viral content, controversy, and clickbait—over a healthier ecosystem of people, opinions, and perspectives.
- As users, we’re incentivized to chase the quixotic, highly ephemeral celebrity algorithmically meted out by the platforms. Having attained it—through a viral tweet or TikTok dance—individuals, like trees, might initially flourish. But when we sever people from their context and thrust them into the glaring exposure of the sun, bad things happen. The trolls, like mountain pine beetles, proliferate, digging under the bark. Controversy sparks like wildfire, scorching the earth. Most of all, it’s lonely in the clear cut, where there are no teachers, no friends, only consumers.
- To build resilient decentralized networks, let us create “Mother nodes”—sites in the network bearing a responsibility of care. We’ve built institutions like these before: consider public libraries, which serve both as bearers of cultural memory and as generous sources of nutrients for our minds and communities. As Joanne McNeil wrote in Lurking, her excellent people’s history of the internet, “librarians are what the internet is aching for—people on task to care about the past, with respect to the past and also to what it shall bequeath to the future.” Can we reimagine libraries for the digital age?
- internet could be: a mutualistic entanglement of platforms and users, in which resources are distributed according to need. A network where nobody is left to fend for themselves in the clear-cut, or expected to feed a never-ending desire for content. A place where elders with thick barks and deep taproots weather the wildfires, connecting us all to history, bringing continuity to our communities and preventing us from repeating old mistakes.
title: ”🌳 What Can the Internet Learn From Trees?”
author: “newpublic.substack.com”
url: ”https://newpublic.substack.com/p/-what-can-the-internet-learn-from”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
🌳 What Can the Internet Learn From Trees?
Metadata
Highlights
- In a healthy forest, the roots of these trees would be mingling with helpful fungi to transmit water and nutrients to one another, in a mutualistic network scientists call the “wood wide web.” At 70 MPH, I wonder if these Los Angeles eucalyptuses are still able to connect to one another under the roar of the freeway. Surrounded by asphalt, do they bind together, pooling meager resources, surviving one day at a time? I wonder how it feels at the edge, where the forest ends, and their messages have nowhere left to go.
- Ecosystems are like human societies: they’re built on relationships. “Our success in coevolution—our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species,” Simard wrote. “Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow, and thrive.”The life of a forest is many lives, entwined. It’s also intergenerational. The eldest trees—having survived storms, droughts, ravenous insects, and the damage wrought by capitalism and colonialism—serve as the central hubs of the wood wide web. They are the strongest, the most resource-rich, with taproots stretching far beneath the earth. Suzanne Simard calls these elders “Mother Trees,” as do many indigenous people.
- The web isn’t what it used to be. When the editors of Nature compared mycorrhizal fungi to a computer network, the web was still predominantly peer-to-peer, its users sharing their thoughts on personal home pages and homespun message-boards. Online advertising was in its infancy. But as the web has centralized, it has strayed further and further from the ideal presented by the wood wide web.
- In the forest, lowered biodiversity doesn’t give high-value crops an advantage: it ultimately reduces productivity, invites rot, pests, and disease, and amplifies the risk and spread of wildfire.
- If we take the metaphor of the wood wide web seriously, it’s hard not to see an analogy here to the context collapse endemic to social media. A few corporations control the lion’s share of public cloud infrastructure, and monopolistic ISPs exploit everyday users. Tech and social media giants have clear-cut the web, privileging high-value crops—viral content, controversy, and clickbait—over a healthier ecosystem of people, opinions, and perspectives.
- As users, we’re incentivized to chase the quixotic, highly ephemeral celebrity algorithmically meted out by the platforms. Having attained it—through a viral tweet or TikTok dance—individuals, like trees, might initially flourish. But when we sever people from their context and thrust them into the glaring exposure of the sun, bad things happen. The trolls, like mountain pine beetles, proliferate, digging under the bark. Controversy sparks like wildfire, scorching the earth. Most of all, it’s lonely in the clear cut, where there are no teachers, no friends, only consumers.
- To build resilient decentralized networks, let us create “Mother nodes”—sites in the network bearing a responsibility of care. We’ve built institutions like these before: consider public libraries, which serve both as bearers of cultural memory and as generous sources of nutrients for our minds and communities. As Joanne McNeil wrote in Lurking, her excellent people’s history of the internet, “librarians are what the internet is aching for—people on task to care about the past, with respect to the past and also to what it shall bequeath to the future.” Can we reimagine libraries for the digital age?
- internet could be: a mutualistic entanglement of platforms and users, in which resources are distributed according to need. A network where nobody is left to fend for themselves in the clear-cut, or expected to feed a never-ending desire for content. A place where elders with thick barks and deep taproots weather the wildfires, connecting us all to history, bringing continuity to our communities and preventing us from repeating old mistakes.